All times Eastern (click ‘Inauguration Schedule’ second from top on the right sidebar for, well, the Inauguration (weekend) Schedule).

ABC

Coverage kicks off on Sunday with a special report on the president’s oath of office at 11:55 am, followed by continuous coverage on Monday from 9:30 am – 5 pm, anchored by Dan Harris along with Olivier Knox. Evening coverage continues with a live feed from both inaugural balls, and ABC News and Yahoo! will stream a post-inaugural show called After: The 2nd Inauguration of President Barack Obama, on Tuesday at 10 am …

BET & CENTRIC

Ed Gordon and Cynne Simpson will anchor coverage of the inauguration and celebrate the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday from the roof of the Newseum in Washington, D.C., airing live at 11 am Jan. 21. Live coverage of the parade will be featured on the networks starting at 3 pm ….

CBS
Scott Pelley will lead CBS News’ live coverage of the inauguration, including the official swearing in at the White House on Sunday, Jan. 20 …

The network’s Inauguration Day coverage on Monday begins with a three-hour CBS This Morning at 7am co-hosted by Charlie Rose, Gayle King and Norah O’Donnell from the National Mall. Immediately following this, Pelley will begin anchoring CBS News’ daylong inauguration broadcast (10 am – 4pm)….

CNN

CNN’s coverage will begin with the private ceremony on Sunday, Jan. 20 …. starting at 10 am and leading up to a primetime special at 8 pm. Inauguration eve special editions of Piers Morgan Tonight and Anderson Cooper 360 will follow.

On Jan. 21, Early Start With John Berman and Zoraida Sambolin and Starting Point With Soledad O’Brien begin CNN’s coverage at 5 am. At 9 am, Wolf Blitzer will be joined by John Berman, Kate Bolduan, Soledad O’Brien and Jessica Yellin, live from the U.S. Capitol West Front, while Anderson Cooper will be on the National Mall with Gloria Borger, David Gergen, John King, Brooke Baldwin and Don Lemon….

On Monday, Candy Crowley will report from the inauguration ceremony platform…..

C-SPAN

C-SPAN‘s coverage of begins with a look back at his first. On Sunday, Jan. 20, at 10:30 am, the network will look back at his 2009 inaugural address. This is followed by a discussion with former presidential speechwriters about this year’s address and how past inaugural addresses have been crafted. Then, there will be live coverage of the president’s official swearing in by Chief Justice John Roberts at 11:55 am.

On Jan. 21, C-SPAN’s live coverage of the inauguration begins at 7 am….

MSNBC

On Sunday, Jan. 20, Up With Chris Hayes (8 am) and Melissa Harris-Perry (10 am) will start from Washington, D.C. Then, Chuck Todd will anchor live coverage of the private swearing-in ceremony beginning at 11:50 am.

On Monday, Jan. 21, Way too Early and an extended Morning Joe will be live from The Dubliner from 5:30 – 10 am, with Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist. Guests will include Colin Powell, Sen. Tim Kaine, David Axelrod, Maureen Dowd – – Mike Barnicle, Michael Steele and Alex Wagner.

MSNBC’s coverage of the inauguration then continues live from 10 am – 4 pm, hosted by Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews, with Lawrence O’Donnell, Ed Schultz and Rev. Al Sharpton….

MSNBC’s regularly scheduled programming picks up at 4 pm with Martin Bashir and continues through primetime, with hosts live in Washington.

A Nevada lawmaker was arrested on Saturday night for threatening to shoot a colleague, KNTV reported.

According to the Las Vegas Sun, State Assemblyman Steven Brooks was arrested with a loaded gun. He had threatened to shoot Speaker-elect Marilyn Kirkpatrick. He was apparently unhappy with his committee assignments.

He spent the night in custody, the Las Vegas-Review Journal reported.

Brooks is a Democratic assemblyman who represents North Las Vegas. He was first elected in 2010.

As the Sun reported, the Nevada State Assembly recently experienced a shakeup after its previous speaker had lost his bid for reelection. The Democratic caucus was split between Kirkpatrick and another official. Brooks had reportedly been seeking the spot of chairman of the Assembly’s Ways and Means Committee, but the position went to another lawmaker.

Barbara Walters fell on a stair and cut her forehead at the British Ambassador’s residence on Saturday night.

Politico was the first to report Walters’ injury. “Out of an abundance of caution, she went to the hospital to have her cut tended to, have a full examination and remains there for observation,” ABC News’ Jeffrey Schneider said. “Barbara is alert (and telling everyone what to do), which we all take as a very positive sign.”

Walters, who is 83, was in D.C. ahead of President Obama’s second inauguration. She was scheduled to contribute to ABC News’ coverage of the events but will not be on-air Monday, according to TV Newser.

Rush Limbaugh recently said that John Lewis would not have suffered a fractured skull at Selma if he had been armed. That is a profound misunderstanding of just about everything that could be understood about Bloody Sunday or the Civil Rights Movement more generally. John Lewis’s fractured skull, while not exactly the plan, was the key to the success of Selma.

On March 7, 1965 — a day that would become known as “Bloody Sunday” — Lewis and fellow activist Hosea Williams led over 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. At the end of the bridge, they were met by Alabama State Troopers, who ordered them to disperse. When the marchers stopped to pray, the police discharged tear gas and mounted troopers charged the demonstrators, beating them with night sticks. Lewis’s skull was fractured, but he escaped across the bridge, to a church in Selma. Before he could be taken to the hospital, John Lewis appeared before the television cameras calling on President Johnson to intervene in Alabama.
Scenes of the violence, and of the injured John Lewis, were broadcast around the world, and outraged public opinion demanded that the President take action. Two days later, Dr. King led 1,000 members of the clergy on a second march from Selma to Montgomery, with the eyes of the world watching. A week and a day after Bloody Sunday, President Johnson appeared before a joint session of Congress to demand passage of the Voting Rights Act, empowering the federal government to enforce the voting rights of all Americans. The passage of the voting rights act finally brought the federal government into the struggle, squarely on the side of the disenfranchised voters of the South.

John Lewis’s skull fracture hastened the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which may not have passed otherwise for many years. His personal courage and sacrifice are so immense, and so many people are indebted to him, including me, that Rush Limbaugh really shouldn’t utter his name, unless it is to pay him the deep respect that he deserves.

To call him the greatest living American would not be hyperbole, for who would we put before him?

He accomplished through peaceful means what years of armed struggle would never have achieved. What’s unusual is that, unlike others in his category, like Socrates and Jesus and Lincoln and Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., he lived to tell about it. He’s still serving in Congress, doing his little part each day. But he is so much more than a congressman. He’s a giant who doesn’t get the credit he deserves simply because he wasn’t martyred and because he’s too humble to demand it.

When he rode into town on a white horse named Joe Biden back in 2009, Barack Obama was staring down the perfect storm of financial sector collapse, two wars, monumental debt, and a demoralized national identity– just getting started.

Through a series of parliamentary showdowns, very public reckonings, and negotiated hostage standoffs, President Obama has quietly proven himself worthy of a hero’s parade, even if it is just an inauguration ceremony.

Over the past four years, we’ve seen the best the American people have to offer by way of leadership in President Barack Obama. It’s been a grueling endeavor, testing the hearts and minds of critics and allies alike. There’s much more that still needs to be done, but if the past four years is any indication, the next four should continue to set the standard by which all future presidents are measured.

On CBS’s Face The Nation Sunday, host Bob Schieffer announced that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has joined CBS News as a contributor.

After announcing the rest of the roundtable, Schieffer asked Rice her thoughts on how a president’s second inauguration differs from the first. Rice quipped, “Frankly, the first one is a lot more exciting than the second one.”

It’s over. House Republicans, following a literal and metaphorical retreat, have announced they plan to lift the debt ceiling without extracting policy concessions. Whatever mini-dramas may follow, the GOP leadership has both recognized the need to abandon their strategy of using the debt ceiling as a hostage and also to recognize this publicly.

The GOP announcement came wrapped in a face-saving demand that “if the Senate or House fails to pass a budget in that time, Members of Congress will not be paid by the American people for failing to do their job.” The point here is to let right-wingers believe, or at least claim, that they succeeded in extracting some concession in return for not playing Russian roulette with the world economy.

But it’s a superficial gesture. The Senate’s failure to pass a budget resolution has become a ubiquitous Republican talking point, but it’s essentially a meaningless technicality. The Senate is operating under the strictures of the 2011 Budget Control Act. Senate Democrats have avoided a separate vote that would expose them to attacks for having “voted for huge deficits,” or tax hikes, or whatever, but it has had no actual impact on policy.

Also, the part about making Congress go without pay turns out to violate the Constitution (“No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened”). The Constitution used to be a really big theme to the House Republicans, who have been regularly accusing Obama of violating their oddball interpretations of it and even, as recently as last week, reading it aloud on the House floor to demonstrate that they are its sole vigilant guardians, but whatever. The 27th Amendment is obviously not a real part of the Constitution, like the 2nd Amendment or the three-fifths clause.

8 min ago – ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — A teenage boy fatally shot two adults and three children inside an Albuquerque home, authorities said Sunday. The boy was arrested and booked on murder and other charges in connection with the shootings Saturday night, Ber …

As Obama starts his second term, the game has changed: with no need to compromise, he can make defaulting the GOP’s fault

Since this piece was written, President Obama’s “Pat Geary strategy” of offering nothing has … well, succeeded. Friday, Republicans announced that they will take default on the national debt off the table and will push to pass a three-month extension of the debt limit.

Faced with the choice, described below, of default or humiliating walkback, Republicans have chosen the latter. And President Obama’s strategy of holding firm on the debt limit appears, at least for now, to have worked.

Original article starts here:

When it comes to legislative negotiations, Barack Obama doesn’t exactly have the best reputation. Indeed, the dominant view of the president, particularly among his liberal supporters, is that he is a chronic caver, who offers pre-emptive concessions to his opponents, and strikes bad deals with Republicans.

But if the past few weeks are any indication, there appears to be a new sheriff in town. First, there was the fiscal cliff deal, which received more than its share of grudging support from liberals. But the caveat for many was that the agreement only worked if Obama didn’t waver in the subsequent debt limit debate.

If Obama’s press conference earlier this week is any indication, then they might get their wish. On Monday, Obama unveiled his new, uncompromising approach for getting the debt ceiling raised. It’s what I like to call the “Pat Geary strategy”.

For those who have not obsessively memorized every moment of the Godfather Part II, Pat Geary was a fictional Nevada Senator, who tried to put the squeeze on Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino) and the gangster’s plans for Las Vegas gaming operations. Corleone’s response is one of the great moments in American cinema. He tells Geary:

By Susan Eisenhower,
Susan Eisenhower is granddaughter of President Dwight Eisenhower and a business consultant and author
Published: January 17

In 2008, just after Barack Obama was elected president, I gave a television interview regarding what the Obamas might expect on becoming the new first family. I was asked specifically how Malia and Sasha’s lives would change. For a start, I said, they won’t play outside anymore without armed guards.

I know something about that. For the eight years that my grandfather, Dwight Eisenhower, was president of the United States, I had Secret Service protection. Known as the “Diaper Detail,” these armed agents protected my sisters, brother and me from potential kidnappings or other targeted attacks. Such threats might be aimed at hurting us, but they would also strike a devastating blow to the president and possibly our national security.

I repeat: We had Secret Service protection because we were seen as potential targets.

That’s why any thinking person has to be disgusted by the National Rifle Association ad released Wednesday, suggesting that the president is an “elitist hypocrite” because his children have the benefit of armed protection at school and the nation’s children as a whole do not. This is absurd. The nation’s children are not individually at risk the way the Obama children are.

……………………………………………

The NRA’s attack ad should be condemned for exacerbating the dangers faced by the president and his family. Regrettably, it is emblematic of a new trend in public policy and communications strategy. Instead of arguing the merits of an issue, broader public questions are spun into personal attacks. In this case, the NRA has tried to assure the public that the argument is not about guns anymore but about some negative personal image it has concocted for the president. At the end of the ad, a voice intones, “President Obama demands that Americans pay their fair share of taxes, but he’s just another elitist hypocrite when it comes to a fair share of security.”

…“It’s hard to see a president calling for unity when he is suggesting that people who disagree with him don’t disagree with him on policy, but disagree with him because they care more about the NRA or they don’t care — in the case of the debt ceiling — whether the country falls into recession again,” Crowley charged.

“Well, on the debt ceiling, it’s the truth,” Plouffe pointed out. “Think about this, Candy. For the first time in our country’s history…”

“Just reminding people that the president himself, when he was in the Senate, voted against the debt ceiling,” Crowley interrupted. “So these people that he’s suggesting want the country to go into default are doing the same thing he did when he was a senator.”

“No,” Plouffe replied sternly. “He did vote against it, he’s spoken to that. That’s a political vote and he’s learned from that. But at the time, Congress wasn’t threatening to say we’re not going to pay our bills unless we get what we want — deeper cuts in Medicare than are required — or we’re going to tank the economy.”

“I mean, this false equivalence needs to stop,” he added. “The barrier to progress here is not the president. We need more Republicans in Congress to think like Republicans in the country who are seeking compromise who are seeking balance because we are poised here to really grow.”

I have a lot of respect for David Rothkopf but I have a hard to time taking his critique of the president seriously because he really doesn’t back up his argument with much of anything. He says that President Obama is a “lousy manager.” He says that his management grade is a ‘C’ and that it is only that high because his predecessor was so awful.
His main critique is a familiar one. Supposedly, the president doesn’t delegate enough power to his cabinet. I keep hearing this, but I rarely see any examples. Hillary Clinton seemed to shine in her role as Secretary of State, traveling tremendous distances and working so hard that you couldn’t even describe it as tirelessly. She worked to exhaustion. Did she need more responsibility?

Secretary Geithner seemed to run the show at Treasury, sometimes to the point of openly defying the White House. Did he not have enough discretion and power? I would argue the opposite.

Secretaries Gates and Panetta seem to have had few problems exercising their prerogatives. If they felt cut out of the loop, Rothkopf doesn’t provide any examples.

Secretary Duncan seems to have been running the show at the Department of Education without too much interference from above.

Health Secretary Sebelius has been as busy as a bee designing and implementing ObamaCare.

I struggle to see how this cabinet has been shut out and underutilized. Maybe the Commerce Department has been a little chaotic, with unsettled leadership, but that was hardly the president’s fault and, in any case, who really cares?

I would have liked to see a higher profile for Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. Perhaps the criticism would be warranted here.

Even the Transportation Department and Veteran’s Affairs can boast major legislative accomplishments over Obama’s first term.

Rothkopf’s expertise lies with observing the National Security Council and the national security apparatus, and he might have a point if he limited himself to those areas, but that’s not what he’s doing. He’s talking about the Cabinet in general. Just observing that Valerie Jarrett rubs some people the wrong way is not a convincing argument that Obama is a lousy manager.

Rothkopf mentions climate change as one failure arising from poor management. I think it was poor politics to have the House pass a cap and trade bill that had no chance of passing in the Senate, but it was Republican flip-flopping on the issue that caused the failure. Remember that John McCain and Sarah Palin ran on a cap and trade platform.

Rothkopf feels that the administration dragged its feet in dealing with the crises in Egypt, Libya, and Syria, but he doesn’t explain how the management of his cabinet would explain that. It’s seems to me that the administration moved with appropriate caution in all three cases.

I understand his overall point that the American people and the Senate should place more emphasis on management experience when considering candidates for the presidency or to head major departments, but his specific complaints are so sparse and so poorly sourced that his column is basically an ad hominem attack.

I am very surprised that John Dickerson authored this piece about the necessity of smashing the Republican Party in Obama’s second term, but I can’t disagree with any of it. Nonetheless, it puts CBS News in an uncomfortable position, as the right is understandably outraged that a major network’s political director is openly calling for the destruction of the GOP. If the shoe were on the other foot, I would be complaining loudly to CBS. I don’t begrudge the right their outrage in this instance.
Yet, I think it is an opportunity to step back and do some reflection. I can’t compare John Dickerson to Walter Cronkite, but there is something to say for dropping any pretense of dispassionate analysis and crying out for justice when the government, or one part of it anyway, goes so far off the rails as to recklessly endanger the welfare of the people. We can’t continue to ignore climate change. We can’t ignore these shooting massacres. We can’t ignore the plight of millions of undocumented workers anymore. We can’t keep screwing around with our credit rating. We can’t allow the kind of dishonesty in our public discourse that we saw go to such extremes during the Romney campaign. Something has to change, and that something is the behavior and makeup of the modern Republican Party.

Jodi Kantor just can’t resist taking pot shots at FLOTUS. This time, Kantor sinks to a new low by using the Newton Massacre to throw shade:

That informal tone can mask how disciplined she is. Though many surrounding the Obamas say she has changed far more than her husband, mastering a role she initially found uncomfortable, she still treats the job of first lady like a dangerous country through which she must navigate safe passage. The woman who never wanted to live in the bubble now uses it to protect herself, according to friends and former aides, preparing her public activities in 6- and 12-month strategic plans, rarely saying anything unscripted. First ladies are often figures of comfort, but she did not address the Newtown tragedy, beyond two brief letters she published, even though some of her fans were clamoring for the self-described “mom in chief” to do more.

First ladies are often figures of comfort, but she did not address the Newtown tragedy, beyond two brief letters she published, even though some of her fans were clamoring for the self-described “mom in chief” to do more.

Jodi kantor needs to go somewhere. Her disdain for this president is visceral. I saw a tweet of her’s TOD where she was wondering why there should be a 2 nd inauguration. And she said people should give her historical or political reasons, only a practical reason. See, this prez shouldn’t be afforded a second inaugural, because these people don’t think he deserves it. These people are so upset that PBO will not party with them or invite to the family residence.

It must be hard for them that PBO would rather be at home and chill that touch those people in DC with a ten foot pole. His happy home is painful for them.

that song moves me so much it’s scary. it’s haunting and beautiful. and still so relevant today.
why does this change take so long? when we look on the outside it seems that the world is different today, and seems as though it’s moved well beyond the thinking of the 50s-60s. all the outward signs are there. but when we peel away that carefully sculpted, publicly accepted view, we see the lives of too many are still in just as much danger as if time had stopped in 1959.

i’ve learned a horrible lesson from our dear Trayvon Martin. and i’ll make sure my child will NOT be blind to the hate that’s still out there. and my child will be one of the future change makers because he will be taught early on what humanity is capable of- the good and the horribly bad. the right and the wrong.

I love my son but i can’t let him go into this world without the whole truth firmly ingrained into his mind, even though the knowledge of unfairness will no doubt shape his outlook much more critically than i’d wish for any child.

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Even though 3Chics Politico is written and curated by three women: Ametia, Rikyrah, and SouthernGirl2, I must nominate this as one of the most engaging blogs I've found. Devoted to politics and culture, these three shine a light on contemporary life with humor and spirit.